Course Offerings by term

This course is designed to give you strong technical and conceptual skills in video production. This course will prepare you for future video work in film, journalism, media and communications, studio art, and can be useful across many other disciplines. You will learn to create several complete film and audio projects, each challenging you to explore new skills. Class time will be divided into lectures, screenings, and mostly in-class labs and critique. Homework will consist of readings, writing responses, shooting, editing and screenings.

This course surveys the earliest periods of cinema from its inception in the late-19th century up to its consolidation as a form of mass art by the beginning of World War II. At its point of origin,cinema was considered "an invention without a future" by its makers, but we will put this idea to test by exploring the uncanny shocks of the very first short films, through the development of visual storytelling across decades of experimentation, culminating in the extravagant, technically dazzling productions of the 1920s. From then onwards, we will investigate the late silent and early sound cinema through a global lens, making transnational discoveries on how the invention of cinema travelled alongside radical ideas at a time of political upheaval. Through readings and select primary materials, the students will learn about the contextual study of film by considering the technological, economic, aesthetic and social factors that shaped the circumstances of the films' production, exhibition and reception.

This course explores the work of an individual film directors, whose films will be critically analyzed with respect to the cultural, political and artistic contexts of their production and reception. The course is offered every semester to fulfill the art of directing requirement in the film major, though the thematic focus and methodological perspective may change depending on the director in question. Students will have the opportunity to study a significant portion of the entire output of the filmmaker, whose influence and legacy will likewise feature in the discussions. Students will engage with the published scholarship on the director, perform close analysis of their films and investigate their critical reception, through combination of individual and group assignments.

The course will help you learn to direct and produce complex, personally expressive short fictions films. We’ll do this through incremental exercises designed to help you explore storytelling structures, staging, expressive frames, working with actors, sound design, crew negotiation and editing. We’ll also learn essentials of producing, press and distribution. Conducted from the director/producer viewpoint, the course challenges students to create a film that matches form with content and develops production skills through all stages of the process. The class is also an immersive creative workshop, incubating everyone’s ideas with support from the group. Some students will direct their own films. Others will produce other students’ short films in lieu of directing their own film. For best results, it is advised that you have already taken Principles of Video Production and at least one Film Studies course.